common April evening in 1980 Baldwin and I were reminiscing as companion expatriates (I had lived abroad in the Sixties) about the of advanced age times in Paris.

common April evening in 1980 Baldwin and I were reminiscing as companion expatriates (I had lived abroad in the Sixties) about the of advanced age times in Paris. He had lectur the previous day at Emory University onward the "New South," which he had wryly proclaimed didn't exist. He strike one as beinged tired, but strangely contented. In answer to a commentary of mine, he agreed that, ye Paris was where "you paid your dues" I know what I meant by means of this. What Baldwin might have meant postures a question which, curiously, has been disregarded in Baldwin studies: the theme of expatriation.(1) It has been widely recognized that the Parisian and, more broadly, the European experience was crucial in Baldwin's personal and creative life, on the contrary until a recent spate of publications, the lack of: any substantial biography had left a great deal of of that experience in the shadows.(2) Moreover, when analyzing his artistic development: critics look after to polarize the private and the public. Typically, Giovanni's latitude is seen as an intensely personal harrowing of the author's spirits while the confrontations of Another geographical division are perceived as taking place in a more public and political arena (cf Gibson 317) While it is constant that the existential experience of alienation denoteed in Giovanni's Room and the essays gathered in Notes of a Native Son expands in the final novel, Just Above My Head, to a more historically based view of the confrontation of tillages neither the early essays nor Giovanni's place were lacking in social reflection. reciprocally personal resonances abound in Just Above My Head.

"People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them," Baldwin wrote in 1953 (Price 81) Three years later, shortly after finishing Giovanni's place he was to report onward the historic Conference of Negro-African Writers and Artists held at the Sorbonne in Paris, among whose major speakers were the Senegalese bard and statesman Leopold Senghor and the Martiniquan imaginative thinker [i]or[/i] writer Aime Cesaire. The sense of alienation which Baldwin would distill from his private experience of the expatriate condition was already placed in an historical connection by the spectacle of Senghor evoking the unity between art and life characteristic of traditional African tillage but doing so in Paris, in the language of the colonial oppressor.

onward a less metaphysical level, the expatriation of artists from America was a universal occurrence. Since colonial times, the Grand Tour of Europe and more particularly visits to Paris and Rome had signified for the sensitive American artist a get back to the locus of Western civilization. The reasons were numerous: the provinciality of American life, the cultural density of Europe the ne for the artist to distance himself. In this notice Black American writers and artists were no different from their White compatriots. The majority also made the obligatory pilgrimage to Europe on the same level if social reasons were added to the cultural ones

Baldwin's sojourn in Paris was a liberating experience, giving him "the sanction, if individual can accept it, to become oneself" (Price 313) David, the White American hero of Giovanni's expanse comments on this search for identity: "I think that if I had any intimation that the self I was going to find would inflect out to be only the same self from which I had exhausted so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home" (31) Of course, his question is that he cannot accept the sanction. still even for Baldwin, the question of who he was had not been solv from fleeing the social forces which threatened him; those forces had solitary become internalized and the question more personal (Nobody xii).

For many Black Americans living in Paris, the perception was a familiar undivided America had been a case whose walls were black and white. Depending forward which wall one stood against, the choice was a featureless commonality or a shocking alienation. However, this liberation from the driver's seat of color, if liberation it were, barely delivered them to themselves. At this stage of consciousness, Baldwin's lucid analysis act by methods in the early essays to a demythification of the traditional reasons given for going to Paris. Like many comrade expatriates, Baldwin understood that what he describes ironically as Paris's "fine antique air of freedom" was, in fact, a myth pay by substitutioned of skepticism, fatigue (in 2000 years of history the city had seen in such a manner many movements, doctrines, and manifestos), and, finally, the arrogant indifference of the Parisian. The exile seeking freedom "has arrive in effect, to a city which exists sole in his mind" (Price 93) Thus, Baldwin's contrive in the early essays would be the deconstruction of a received expose and its reconstruction based upon the experience of exile.

I have used the limits expatriate and exile interchangeably to describe Baldwin's situation, yet the status which he always claimed for himself was that of an exile (Baldwin and Mead 220-21) Now, exile may be the originate of banishment by superior powers or self-exile becoming to hostile circumstances, and the latter, in fact, does not require physical displacement, as witnessed on the despairing vision of modern York proclaimed in Another Country: "It was a city without oases, trip entirely, insofar, at least, as human perception could report for money; and its citizens assumeed to have lost any brains of their right to renovate themselves. Whoever, in New York, clung to this right, lived in of the present day York in exile . ." (267). For the African American enthrall in particular, the voyage to a foreign land is an exile that restages the original historical and cultural alienation at "home" In common sense, then, the fact of geographic exile can be seen as the symbolic extension of a radical existential exile, and the knot of internal and external in like a perception is difficult to undo.